StoxPoker Rocked Again by Grudzien Controversy

It was only weeks ago when the story swept the poker industry that StoxPoker instructor Jason Ho was at the center of a huge firestorm of controversy. Under the allegations, Ho misrepresented his professional history as a poker player. Ho was removed as an instructor and stories came pouring in about his acts of deceit against fellow instructors and students alike. Now, StoxPoker is once again under fire, this time for founding member Nick “Stoxtrader” Grudzien admitting that he used multiple accounts on multiple online poker sites. Amid the allegations, Grudzien has resigned from his post at StoxPoker.

It all began on March 12th on the TwoPlusTwo forums as high stakes pro David “Viffer” Peat started a thread titled, “Stoxtrader cheating/multi accounting discussion,” which immediately received a lot of attention. In his post, Viffer claimed, in a roundabout way, that “Stoxtrader“and “40putts“were actually the same person. Later in the post, he claimed that this person would short stack and rathole games, an act that is not against the Terms of Service of any site, but largely frowned upon among regulars.

The thread continued and, later, accusations of collusion were brought to light. Some people in the thread have claimed that the allegations of collusion look pretty damning. Viffer, in his second post in the thread, showed that “40putts” and “knockstiff” have been accused of possible collusion in the past with a link to another thread, but also said he did not know if the allegations had been proven to be true or false. Huge online names such as Randy “nanonoko” Lew, Aaron “AE Jones” Jones, and Tom “Durrrr” Dwan posted in the thread with their comments about the situation.

The first reply from Grudzien came two days later as post #43 within the thread. He stated that he had never multi-accounted “for the purpose of deceiving others into giving them action, evading taxes, collusion, entering multiple times into the same tournament, ghosting, to obscure previous results and stats, to clear extra bonuses, to circumvent affiliate CPA or rakeback rules, to bypass the poker sites’ shortstack buy-in time limitation, to team play, to share action with others at the same table, to chip dump, or otherwise engage in underhanded actions I do not know about.” He later went on to say that he had shortstacked when games were tough. He posted a Holdem Manager report of his winnings by stack size, which showed he had played 262,130 hands as a short stacker (under 50 big blinds).

As more allegations of multi-accounting were posted in the thread, the heat kept getting hotter for StoxPoker’s founding member. Under the intense pressure, on March 18th Grudzien posted on his personal blog at StoxPoker.com that he would be resigning from his post at the site. He stated that he had put the company in a difficult position given the recent negative publicity. He admitted to having multiple accounts, but stated that it was not true that he used them to gain an advantage or played on them simultaneously. Grudzien admitted that he had two accounts at PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker for four years. He was known as “stoxtrader” at both sites and used that to prep and produce poker training videos and played in lower stakes than his normal games on that account. He stated that he also played as “40putts” at Full Tilt Poker and “knockstiff” at PokerStars; those were the only accounts he played his normal games on until January 2010.

He later went on to say that in January, he decided to switch names, but could not say why he made that decision, but that it was the same reason he had not been active at the TwoPlusTwo forums defending himself. These two new accounts, “bulltf0rdtuff” and “gr3atvlewbr0,” were used for one month and none of those accounts have been in use since. According to PokerTableRatings.com, however, the “blufftf0rdtuff” account was last used on February 28th on Full Tilt Poker and the same was found for the “gr3atvlewbr0” account at PokerStars.

He concluded his blog post by saying that he would be parting ways from StoxPoker and that the collusion allegations are false. He admitted to discussing strategy with “kinetica” and “littlezen” and that they all practice similar table selection strategies. His final sentence was an apology for breaking the Terms of Service of the poker sites and that he hopes to continue to contribute to TwoPlusTwo and Stox as a regular member in the future.

StoxPoker has been hit hard in recent months thanks to an exodus of high-profile instructors. Both Ho and Grudzien are now gone thanks to tremendous scrutiny and controversy surrounding their perceived unethical behavior. Other top instructors such as Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt and Matt Bolt left the site to become instructors at DragTheBar.com, a new poker training site quickly gaining market share.